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The research was designed to understand the factors that have sustained the use of a seven-hundred-year-old irrigation system (<em>muang fai</em>) in northern Thailand, despite the challenge of a new technology: pumping irrigation water from underground. There were two main objectives. The first was to assess whether the <em>muang fai</em> system is sustainable. The second was to determine the contribution of the <em>muang fai</em> to the groundwater sustainability in the study region. This second objective is related to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG6), water security. The results show that membership of the <em>muang fai</em> is changing slowly and the system is inherently stable, even given various pressures that tend to work against it, such as the increasing average farm size. Also, although the <em>muang fai</em> conserves water relative to other forms of irrigation, there is adequate recharge in the majority of the region to render this contribution to sustainability of the watershed relatively small.